My views on Space Battleship Yamato 2199

January 1, 2014

I've wound up with tangled feelings about Space Battleship Yamato 2199
(henceforth Yamato), although I quite enjoyed watching it. Overall I
think it's an excellent show that falls just short of greatness and is
hard to unconditionally recommend because of one issue. That issue is
with the structure of the overall plot, so let me describe how I see
Yamato.

The core of Yamato is a bunch of excellent real characters who are put
into an overall story that is somewhere between epic space opera and a
mythic story (or a series of mythic stories, starting with a series of
classic war stories). The characters are good, the situations that they
get into are often great, and there are excellent individual episodes,
but because the core is epic, mythic space opera there are a number of
things that happen that are semi-cliches at best. This is especially
the case at the end of the show, where events spiral into a series of
climaxes that are emotionally satisfying but not necessarily entirely
solid and convincing plotting. To enjoy Yamato fully you have to be
willing to accept that things are grand and crazy in the best traditions
of inexplicable space opera and that you will not get explanations for
some core things. It is this not quite successfully executed mythic
nature that costs Yamato its chance at greatness for me. The best
mythic stories are both mythic and completely convincing at the same
time, and Yamato doesn't quite manage that; by the end the seams show
a little bit too much for me.

(To its credit I think that Yamato understands that the cliches
are cliches, so it doesn't try to pretend that they are supposed to
be surprises to us or anything. It speaks to Yamato's excellent
writing and characterization that the cliches are still affecting and
emotionally powerful.)

At its best, Yamato is glorious. And it's at its best quite a lot.
The directing and animation is excellent (it's head and shoulders above
ordinary TV-grade work, well up into OVA or movie territory), it does
action very well, the writing is tight and surprising and capable of
being genuinely disturbing, and it's quite emotionally affecting. There
are all sorts of interesting characters and the show is happy to let
them quietly do things in the background, confident that we'll catch
the bits in passing. One of the things worth noting is that Yamato
doesn't stop to explain very much about the Gamilan characters; there
is a real sense that we're just seeing a little slice of their lives
as they intersect the Yamato's journey and there is a whole sprawling
complex history that we don't know.

(This is probably going to frustrate some viewers because at various
points we're left to take a lot on faith instead of having the real
background to understand things. I was not bothered by it for various
reasons and in fact found it kind of interesting and refreshing.)

By the way I would be remiss if I didn't single out episode 14 for special
praise (it's the famous mental episode; see eg Shinmaru's writeup).
This is not just a genuinely weird and suspenseful episode in the best
traditions of good horror, it's also loaded with subtle, well done
character backstory (and character development). This backstory emerges
naturally because the characters involved are being ensnared in their
own memories, which effectively gives us (deliberately nightmarish)
flashbacks without the bad taste that flashbacks can often have.

Liked: very much.
Rewatch: possibly, although I'm not sure I'd see anything more in a second
viewing.